I was recently contacted by Epigroove, makers of an application called BookCaseTM. They have a trademark on the term, BookCase, and asked me to change the name of my software. I certainly don’t want any confusion, and they do have a trademark, so I agreed to rename my Bookcase.

I’ve been tossing around names for the past week or so. A few generic names did suggest themselves:

Collector - rather generic, but simple and informative as to the nature of the software.

Kollector - following the KDE meme of using the letter ‘K’ everywhere, but I find that rather silly.

KCollector, KBook, KCatalog, etc. - out for the same reason.

I also considered names with more of an exotic-feel to them:

Callimachus - the name of the librarian at Alexandria, and suggested by a user. Might step on the toes of the Callimachus Group, though.

Colophon - I’m partial to names with Greek or Latin heritage, and while Colophon doesn’t really describe the function of the software, I thought it had a cool sound and was at least relevant to books.

Hyperdex - considering the software to index a collection, along with the always popular hyper- prefix, but I figured hyperdex might be a little too weird.

Bacchus - the Greek god of wine. Has a similar phonetic sound to Bookcase.

Tacoma - taking the first two letters from collection manager, and finding a word to fit, well, I like that, and neither the state of Washington or Toyota would probably mind.

But, I think I have settled on Tellico, which is the name of a town close to where I grew up. Sure, the name has nothing to do with the software’s function. Sure, that probably means that some users may not discover it as easily. But, I like the sound, and naming my software after my home-town is appealing. Plus, most users either click an icon or find the menu item anyway, so the name doesn’t really matter. KDE is nice enough to add Collection Manager to the menu item, as well. And I’m fairly certain that I won’t have to go through another name change in the future, either, since I can’t find any other software named Tellico nor does it seem to be trademarked.

I’m going to ruminate on the name change a little longer before deciding. The name-change will be the whole hog, though; all of the documentation, etc. I’ll change the URL of the app, but use an HTTP redirect so I don’t break things. I’ll probably leave the default file extension as .bc. I’m not sure what the name change will do to the application records at Freshmeat or kde-apps.org, but maybe they can cope.